Web Scale Infra

Ø  According to Gartner, and as you know they’re always right J, by 2017 Web-Scale technology will be an architectural approach found operating in 50 percent of global enterprises, up from less than 10 percent in 2013!

Ø  The idea behind Web-Scale infrastructures is conversion, a way to combine, or integrate, multiple infrastructural components like (server) compute, storage, networking and virtualization into a single platform or appliance of some sort.

Ø  Resources are than aggregated and pooled, positively impacting performance, flexibility and overall efficiency. Management is centralized and simplified since converged infrastructures are, or should be, managed as a single entity no matter how big they get.

Ø  Web Scale computing focuses on scale-out rather than scale-up technologies and since, as mentioned, its resources are aggregated directly from the underlying hardware, workloads can be scaled up without needing to scale up individual server and or other related hardware, again, offering simplicity and ease of management.

Ø  Web Scale uses technologies like, data deduplication, data tiering, writes are being replicated, physical components are redundant, multiple times over in most cases, data gets compressed, and the list goes on. All this combined make that Web Scale technology is extremely robust. Eg: Nutanix

The best practices we once knew will soon become obsolete and known as ‘just’ practices, the way we once ‘did’ stuff. Another thing to think about is how we not only manage, but also need to support, upgrade and expand (scalability) our current infrastructures which isn’t an easy task with the hardware-centric architectures we’ve got going today.

Source: http://www.basvankaam.com/2014/06/18/what-is-web-scale-technology-and-where-does-it-come-from/